This invention relates to the field of agricultural product packing equipment and more particularly to devices adapted to efficiently pack delicate fruits and vegetables into containers with a minimum of bruising to the foodstuffs. More specifically, this invention concerns an automated device which receives delicate fruit from some external delivery means and then gently and gradually lowers the delivered fruit into a fruit bin until the bin is completely and evenly filled for subsequent storage or shipment.
A considerable problem with large scale packing of delicate agricultural foodstuffs is the bruising of individual fruits and/or vegetables in the process of grading, sorting and packing. It is well known that fruit or vegetables with even a small percentage of their surface area so bruised will not only deteriorate rapidly in quality themselves, but will cause surrounding fruits and/or vegetable to similarly deteriorate over time. As the deterioration time is not instantaneous, particularly when the foodstuffs are refrigerated, it is possible to pack for immediate shipment to market centers small quantities of fruit with some small degree of surface bruising without significant sacrifice of marketability of the delivered product. Any individual fruits or vegetables which arrive at the market in sufficiently damaged condition are simply discarded and there usually has not been time for the damaged fruit to cause deterioration to the rest of the fruit in the packing.
Large agricultural food products packing houses frequently receive large ungraded and unsorted quantities of a particular fruit or vegetable in season. Market demand is often not synchronized with nature's season. Through various well known methods and processes, the fruit or vegetables are graded and sorted inside the packing house. Those grades and kinds for which there is believed to be an immediate market are immediately packed and shipped to the market centers. However, there are usually one or more kinds of fruit in one or more grades of quality for which there is no immediate market, and these fruits and vegetables must be stored under refrigeration until the market is ready for them.
Sometimes these fruits and vegetables bound for storage are packed off the grading lines into small containers and refrigerated in order to minimize the problem of bruising the delicate food stuffs. However, packing into small boxes and storage in refrigeration is time consuming and expensive, particularly when most of the individual small boxes must later be opened and inspected for bruising and deterioration and then repacked into shipping containers when a market is eventually found for the product. It is the usual practice therefore to store the grades and kinds of fruit and vegetables for which there is no immediate market in large open bins in order to cut down on the costs of packing and repacking. However, methods of packing fruit and vegetables into large bins are none too gentle, with the result that considerable fruit and vegetables are damaged, become deteriorated, and cause the deterioration of surrounding foodstuffs in the bin. This results in substantial economic loss to the fruit crop.
Various solutions to the problem of packing delicate fruit such as apples or pears into large bin type containers have been attempted. One very expensive and cumbersome apparatus and method involves 80 foot long troughs of water into which the particular grade/sort of apple is unloaded followed by a mechanical transfer of the apples from the trough through a vertical column of water from beneath which the fruit bin is raised to collect the apples from the water. The water permits the apples to float in a cushioning medium but there are still a substantial percentage of bruises occurring, the apples must soak in the water for long periods of time which is not conducive to the highest standards of quality, the apparatus requires a very large room, and it is expensive to make and maintain. Several devices are known which automatically feed containers successively to a position beneath some kind of delivery ramp or chute so that the fruit is permitted to roll down the inclined side of the container to the bottom of the container, and then the container is gradually lowered to a position where the bottom of the container is horizontal when the box is near to filling. These devices are usually adapted to the use of the smaller cardboard type market shipping containers for fruit. The devices allow for varying degrees of droppage and collision of individual pieces of fruit with one another and operate at varying rates of efficiency in loading.
Several devices are adapted for filing round tub type containers to which is imparted a slow spin so that the fruit comes off a delivery ramp or conveyor of some sort and is deposited on the rotating mass of fruit in the bin. One such device employs a flexible ramp of length greater than the distance from the delivery conveyor to the surface of the collected fruit in an attempt to further cushion the delivery of the fruit to the bin. These devices still permit substantial bruising to occur and operate very slowly and inefficiently.
Still other devices permit the gradual collection of fruit by some collecting means above the eventual container in such a way that the collecting means is gradually lowered toward, and in one case partially into, the container, but when the collecting means has reached a predetermined state of fullness, the fruit within it is then permitted to roll out from the bottom of the collecting means and fall some substantial distance to the bottom of the container, thus permitting bouncing and bruising to occur. These devices also operate with less than optimum efficiency.